Do This For PRO Sounding Bass

I'm going to show you the secret to pro sounding bass so you never have to worry about your bass sounding weak again. So what I'm going to do in this video is build a bass pattern and I'm going to show you three things that I always look for in my bass to make sure it sits well in the mix and ultimately sounds good. Let's get into it. Here's the piece of music I have that needs the bass. Number one is to pick a good sound. It sounds simple but this is notoriously done wrong by beginner producers. So I'm going to make my go-to bass sound anytime I need a quick simple bass sound to get an idea out. And by the way this sound is available in the Daydream Pack in the description below this video for free. Initialize preset. I'm going to give us a square wave. I'm going to turn the filter on, tighten it up, pull the cutoff down, take envelope two and wrap the cutoff knob and then I'm going to turn it into a pluck like this. We get this sound. Let's warm it up a bit. That bass sound sounds good. It's simple but it's heavy and now that brings us to number two. Number two is to make sure your sub bass looks good and here's what I mean by that. Sub bass sounds the best when it hits in between 40 and 80 hertz. So what I like to do is load up an EQ on my bass instrument and then just play back the bass and make sure that its strongest frequencies are in between this general area on the EQ. So I'm looking for this high point right here. So that looks good. I don't have to change any notes but in the event that some of your notes are hitting out of that range or like too far out of that range, all you would do is try different octaves and see which octave for your note that you're trying to hit sounds and looks the best. Number three is that I always look for a way to add character to my bass. You could do this with distortion, adding a filter to it or you could add a layer to it. This bass doesn't need any distortion on it because it has a lot of mid-range presence. So what I'm going to do is add a layer to see if we can't make it come alive. So I'm just going to take my bass layer here and duplicate it so then we get the same exact sound. And I'm going to open Serum and just add unison to oscillator A and watch what happens. Now it's all wide. Watch the difference when I add unison to this oscillator here. Here's one unison. Now here is when I just add some unison. We will get that naturally spread sound. We could do some little tricks to make the pluck a little bit more defined. So here's our original bass layer. Now here it is with the additional layer, the wide layer. And with everything, that was my secret for pro-sounding bass every time. As always, we have free sounds for you guys in the description below. Also, if you would like my personal guidance in your music production journey, check out my course at the top of the description below. I'll see you guys in the next video.